When it is acknowledged at all, John Buchan's contribution to Scots vernacular poetry is typically (and elliptically) presented as primarily curatorial in nature. Such views began even with those who knew his poetry and who were themselves championed by Buchan. Hugh MacDiarmid, for instance, who in 1966 described his erstwhile friend and early advocate as ‘not a poet of any consequence’, nevertheless regarded The Northern Muse (1924) as ‘by far the best anthology of Scottish poetry available at the time’. Alistair McCleery, writing in 1986, criticizes Buchan in terms that implicitly suggest that the role of anthologist was more appropriate for him than the role of poet: ‘in [Buchan's] later poetry (1917), the use of Scots, although skilful, is redolent of a literary exercise rather than the record of a living tongue’. Even J. Derrick McClure's laudable history of post-1878 Scots vernacular poetry elides Buchan's contributions to that history, mentioning him only once in passing as the writer of the preface to Violet Jacob's Songs of Angus (1915). The standard histories of Scottish literature in the twentieth century almost invariably cite Buchan only as the author of ‘shockers’ – the espionage/thriller novels that helped update the adventure and romance traditions for the modern age.